Local real estate group: market adjusting, inventory up for first quarter

By Rye Druzin | rdruzin@mrt.com | @druzin_journo

Published 8:45 am, Friday, May 1, 2015

Photo: James Durbin

Image 1of/1

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 1

Construction at the Betenbough Homes subdivision located on Champions Drive near the sports complex. Photographed June 20, 2014. James Durbin/Reporter-Telegram

Construction at the Betenbough Homes subdivision located on Champions Drive near the sports complex. Photographed June 20, 2014. James Durbin/Reporter-Telegram

Photo: James Durbin

Local real estate group: market adjusting, inventory up for first quarter

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

Editor's Note: The following story was replaced to add corrections to the original version

The first quarter of 2015 recorded the highest number of available listings and the lowest sales since 2009, according to recent statistics from the Permian Basin Board of Realtors.

An average of 526 homes were on the market per month during the first quarter, just below the 558 average from 2009’s first quarter and higher than the 313 average for the first quarters of the last five years.

During the first three months of 2015, 307 homes were sold, below the 382 first quarter average for the past five years. This is the lowest number of sales since 2009, when Midland’s real estate market felt the brunt of the recession. The Midland market is moving toward a buyer’s market after years of a seller’s market marked by low supply and high demand, according to local Realtors and real estate experts in past Reporter-Telegram articles.

Year-over-year March figures were mostly down. Median sold home prices increased by 5.9 percent, but average sold home prices were down by 7.9 percent. The number of homes sold and dollar volume were all lower than March 2014 data provided from the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M. The PBBOR numbers show that the number of listings were up by more than 74 percent compared to March 2014.

Average and median sale prices for the first quarter fell by 3.2 and 2.1 percent respectively from the same period in 2014, while monthly year-over-year prices have oscillated up and down between January and March. Most of the data points to a stagnating market as prices have yet to come down significantly.

Permits for new homes also decreased to 194 in the first quarter of 2015 from a high of 303 in 2014, according to data compiled from city records obtained through a Reporter-Telegram open records request. In a March interview, Jim Gaines of the Real Estate Center said that a reduced growth of the home market would be a symptom of the slumping oil industry.

“We’re not going to have the expansion like we’ve had the last three years” he said. “So not only is the balloon not expanding, the balloon is contracting some. I don’t want to be harbinger of bad things, but what we’re looking for now is a balance in the marketplace.”

Gaines said that the past few years have shown record levels of growth. Figures calculated from Real Estate Center data show that average and median home prices grew by more than 40 percent between 2010 and 2014. The real estate expert said that the downturn will “look a little scarier maybe than it is.”

The dollar volume of real estate sold is the lowest since the downturn hit the local market from during 2009 to 2011. While real estate valued at $113 million exchanged hands in the first quarter of 2014, only $82 million of real estate was sold in 2015, marking a 27 percent drop in dollar volume, according to the Real Estate Center’s figures.